"I found it very troubling that you sought to create a perception of parity between my experience and perspective and the death of Palestinian innocent civilians." More from the American rabbi in Jerusalem.

"I am very grateful for the Israeli 'know how' that created it, the effective AIPAC lobbying that ensured its funding, and the Congressional and Presidential support that made it available to the citizens of Israel." So writes an American rabbi from a bomb shelter in Jerusalem.

The Erie Canal. The transcontinental railroad. The Interstate Highway system. Big, expensive, controversial—and indispensable. Is the next one in this series a new rail network in our most famously freeway-centric state?

“There’s a lot we don’t know about what works in financial education,” said Reid Cramer, director of the Assets Building Program at New America, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. “We don’t know how information translates to knowledge, and there’s real challenge to teaching people who aren’t connected to financial systems in a basic way.”

One of our partners in our American Futures project, along with Marketplace radio, is the Esri mapping/geographic-info company of Redlands, California. Here are two interactive maps Esri has recently produced that I think are potential time-sinks of the instructive rather than of the "you'll hate yourself when you spend half an hour this way" variety.

Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert at the New America Foundation think tank, praised Obama's address and approach. In the Philippines, he said, local commandos trained by American forces had severely weakened the Abu Sayyaf militant movement. Over the ...